Tag: palestine

Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It’s a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a “tragic mistake.”

British doctor James Smith called the fire “one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I’ve been working in Gaza.” CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

“The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific,” Warren stated on social media. “Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu’s assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire.”

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. “Ma’am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel,” he wrote in a response to Warren’s statement.

Warren’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid “follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid.”

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are “reasonable” accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave “credible and reliable” assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be “supplying the weapons” for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: “A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that’s very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage.”

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What Israel Is Doing to Gaza Is a Choice

Anyone who has voiced opposition to what the government of Israel is currently doing in Gaza has undoubtedly heard the various ways Israel’s defenders excuse, dismiss, and justify Israel’s actions. Sometimes you’ll hear that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is doing everything in its power—more than any other military in history—to avoid hurting civilians and that Hamas is responsible for any innocents who get killed because they are using them as human shields.

Other times you’ll be told that the people of Gaza, as a whole, deserve what’s happening to them because some of them voted for Hamas eighteen years ago or because Palestinian support for the attacks on October 7 has only grown in the months since.

But there is a common assumption underlying just about every argument you’ll hear. Israel’s defenders act like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have had no choice but to react to the attacks of October 7 in the manner that they have.

With that assumption smuggled in, defenders can then act like anyone who has problems with what Israel is doing in Gaza is actually opposed to the operation’s stated goals—rescuing the hostages and breaking up Hamas.

It’s a rhetorical trick that is as dishonest as it is ridiculous. Israel did not have to wage an assault on Gaza like this. And, in fact, by doing so, it appears to be impeding its own stated objectives.

Hours after Hamas fighters had withdrawn back to Gaza on October 7 and the IDF had retaken control of the assailed southern border towns, Israel began employing what would become the defining tool of its response: the airstrike.

In the months since, Israeli forces have dropped tens of thousands of bombs on the Gaza Strip. In some cases, these strikes are meant to provide direct air support for IDF troops engaged on the ground. In others, Gazan infrastructure and high-rises in the heart of cities are targeted to help “exert civil pressure” on Hamas.

But most of these strikes are designed to kill men that Israeli forces have determined to be Hamas militants. The method used to select such targets was laid out thoroughly in a recent report by Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham.

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Biden’s $320M Gaza Pier Has Detached & Drifted Onto Israeli Beach

A section of the $320 million floating pier built and erected off Gaza’s coast has broken off and floated onto an Israeli beach. The Saturday mishap is the latest setback for the US humanitarian aid project, after three US troops were reported injured aboard the pier two days prior, including one critically.

The Times of Isreal’s military correspondent Emanuel Fabian has reported that “An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say.”

The recovery operation has not gone well either, as “Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached,” Fabian writes.

And yet a second US Army vessel also got stuck in shallow waters while trying to rescue the pier section. Overnight US ships had been moving two pieces of the floating pier to the Port of Ashdod in southern Israel when the now beached section detached and drifted away. American troops can be seen in footage standing helplessly on the beach.

An official US Central Command (CENTCOM) statement says the following:

This morning four U.S. Army vessels supporting the maritime humanitarian aid mission in Gaza were affected by heavy sea states. The vessels broke free from their moorings and two vessels are now anchored on the beach near the pier.

The third and fourth vessels are beached on the coast of Israel near Ashkelon. Efforts to recover the vessels are under way with assistance from the Israeli Navy.

The pier operation was already last week off to a rough start — and was paused for two days — after desperate Palestinians mobbed and ransacked the first trucks transporting aid unloaded from the pier before they could reach a distribution warehouse managed by the World Food Programme.   

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Israel’s censorship of the AP is a cautionary tale for the US

Philosophers consider slippery slope arguments to be logical fallacies. But those philosophers haven’t met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. 

It took Israel about three weeks after banning Al Jazeera — due to purported national security risks stemming from its Qatari funding — to use the same law as a pretext to censor the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news agencies. 

Fortunately, Israel quickly reversed course after pressure from the U.S. and press organizations. But the ordeal should serve as a cautionary tale for President Biden and U.S. lawmakers and prosecutors. They keep empowering future administrations to harass the media — apparently trusting them, against all historical evidence, to use restraint.  

And if (more like when) the U.S. government does abuse its new powers against the press, the superpower is not likely to back off in response to international pushback like Israel did. Otherwise Julian Assange would be a free man. 

Israel’s justification for the raid was that the AP broke the law by providing images to Al Jazeera, which is among numerous clients worldwide that receive video feeds from the AP. There was no allegation that any image endangered national security, but officials nonetheless seized the AP’s equipment, killing its live feed and temporarily stripping millions of people of a view inside Gaza. 

Perhaps Israeli authorities saw transparency itself as a national security threat. The U.S. should be able to relate — officials who once sought to censor the Pentagon Papers on security grounds now acknowledge the government’s real concern was embarrassment. 

Israel has shut the international press out of Gaza (in addition to killing at least 100 journalists). Some even floated sanctioning the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, for criticizing the current government. Biden’s administration is reportedly concerned about journalists turning public opinion against Israel by exposing the devastation the Israel-Gaza war has caused. 

With that backdrop, who could’ve predicted that Israel wouldn’t stop with Al Jazeera once it started censoring news outlets? Well, other than press freedom advocates everywhere. 

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Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population

None of the aid that has been unloaded from the temporary pier the US constructed off the coast of Gaza has been delivered to the broader Palestinian population, as the US works with the UN and Israel to identify safe delivery routes inside the enclave, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

Several desperate Gazans intercepted trucks delivering aid from the pier over the weekend, leading the UN to suspend the delivery operations until the logistical challenges are resolved.

The US is working with Israel and the United Nations to establish “alternative routes” for the safe delivery of the 569 tons of aid transported to Gaza since last week, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday.

Asked whether any of the aid has been delivered to the people of Gaza, Ryder said, “As of today, I do not believe so.” He added that aid had been held in an assembly area on shore, but as of Tuesday had begun getting moved to warehouses for distribution throughout Gaza as alternative routes have been established.

A US official told CNN that the Defense Department and UN are still working to determine how much aid can be held at he staging area inside Gaza at any given time.

The amount of aid getting to the Gaza shoreline from its initial staging area in Cyprus has also fallen short of initial Pentagon estimates.

Since Friday, more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance have been delivered through the temporary pier, called JLOTS, or Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, to the shore of Gaza to be distributed by humanitarian partners, Ryder said. But Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command, said last week that the US hoped to initially transport 500 tons of aid per day via the pier, and scale up as time went on.

Over the weekend, as trucks began moving the aid delivered off the floating pier, CNN reported that a group of men in Gaza intercepted the aid, saying they did not trust that it was actually meant for the Palestinian people.

“I have doubts,” Mounir Ayad, a Gaza resident, told CNN near the pier. “I don’t understand this floating pier or what it indicates and what its purpose is. They say it’s for aid, but people are apprehensive. Is this aid or something else? We know that the US has never supported the Palestinian cause, so it’s implausible that it’s giving us aid without something in return.”

Ryder acknowledged on Tuesday that some initial aid brought into Gaza was “intercepted by some people who took that aid off those vehicles.”

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Gallant Tells Sullivan Israel Will Escalate Military Operations in Rafah

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made clear to US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in a meeting in Israel on Monday that Israel will escalate in Rafah despite the White House’s supposed objection to a major military operation in the city.

“We are committed to broadening the ground operation in Rafah to the end of dismantling Hamas and recovering the hostages,” Gallant told Sullivan, according to a statement from the Israeli minister’s office.

President Biden has threatened consequences for Israel if it launched a major attack on “population centers” in Rafah, but he has not taken action as Israel continues to escalate its operations in the city.

The UN estimates that over 800,000 civilians out of the 1.4 million who were sheltering in Rafah have already evacuated, and aid groups are warning that the places they are going lack water supplies and other basic necessities.

The US claimed it was opposed to an Israeli plan to attack the city without accounting for the civilians but has continued to back Israel as it’s ordered evacuations with no clear place for civilians to go.

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“Act of madness”: Israeli officials seize AP equipment, cut live feed of Gaza

Israeli officials seized broadcasting equipment belonging to the Associated Press on Tuesday, arguing it was used to provide images to Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem bureau was shuttered earlier this month following the passage of a new foreign broadcast law.

Why it matters: Press advocates have warned that the law creates a dangerous precedent for censoring independent news outlets in the region amid the ongoing war with Hamas.

  • Israeli lawmakers passed the measure last month, empowering the country’s communications minister to take action against any foreign media network that it can prove poses a national security risk.
  • Tuesday’s seizure has already garnered sharp criticism, with Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid calling it “an act of madness.”

Driving the news: Officials seized AP’s equipment in the southern town of Sderot on Tuesday afternoon, arguing the global news agency had violated the new law by providing a live feed of northern Gaza to Qatar-based Al Jazeera, AP reported.

  • According to the Israeli Ministry of Communications, the confiscated equipment includes a camera, tripod, live modem and two microphones.

AP reported that it “complies with Israel’s military censorship rules, which prohibit broadcasts of details like troops movements that could endanger soldiers.”

  • “The live shot has generally shown smoke rising over the territory,” it reported.
  • “The Qatari satellite channel is among thousands of clients that receive live video feeds from the AP and other news organizations,” it added.
  • The seizure of the equipment followed a refusal by AP to adhere to an order from Israeli officials last week to cut the live feed.

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George Clooney Co-Hosting A Biden Fundraiser While Amal Clooney Sits On The Committee Indicting Israeli Officials and Hamas Leaders

Politics get confoundlingly complicated at times and 2024 leans into some of the more bizarre partisan politics ever in recent times as proven in the latest developments with George Clooney and Julia Roberts set to host a Biden fundraiser in California next month with Barack Obama, while Amal Clooney has been sitting on an advisory panel that resulted in the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant applications of Israel officials and Hamas leaders on Monday.

The Biden fundraiser scheduled for mid-June is designed to have Clooney and Roberts engage grassroots donors over social media. They are also expected to lend their names for the Biden campaign emails and text messages.

The U.K.-based international panel of legal experts, of which one was Mrs. Amal Clooney, a noted human rights lawyer, gave their unanimous consent to Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor. Khan had announced months ago that he would investigate everyone involved in the October 7 Hamas attack inside Israel, as well as Israeli’s response inside Gaza. He is now seeking arrests warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders on war crimes charges.

“The attacks by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the military response by Israeli forces in Gaza have tested the system of international law to its limits,” Clooney and other legal advisors wrote in an op-ed published in The Financial Times. The other members of the panel include: Lord Justice Fulford, Judge Theodor Meron CMG, Danny Friedman KC, Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst CMG KC.

“…The prosecutor has taken a historic step to ensure justice for the victims in Israel and Palestine by issuing applications for five arrest warrants alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity by senior Hamas and Israeli leaders,” the op-ed noted.

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House votes to punish Biden for pausing some bombs for Israel

The Israel Security Assistance Support Act that passed the House on Thursday is primarily a messaging and political bill — one aimed at emphasizing Republican support for Israel and dividing Democrats between those who want to support President Joe Biden’s decision to pause the delivery of a shipment of bombs to Israel and those who prefer to maintain Washington’s unconditional support for Tel Aviv’s war.

Despite reports that up to 40 Democrats could go against Biden and support the bill, in the end, only 16 voted for it. Three Republicans — Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — joined with the rest of the Democratic caucus in opposition.

To be sure, if the legislation — led by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) — were to become law, it would be consequential, as it would restrict the budgets of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council if Biden doesn’t deliver the withheld weapons. But after Biden pledged to veto the bill if it ever reaches his desk, senate Democratic leadership said it would not it take up.

There are plenty of policy, political, and legal reasons to oppose the legislation.

“Congressman Calvert’s bill would wipe away decades of US law and policy that set clear human rights and humanitarian standards for all recipients of US weapons. No country — including Israel — should get special exemptions from these standards,” John Ramming Chappel of the Center for Civilians in Conflict said in a press release on Tuesday. “No legislator who cares about human rights or the rule of law should support this proposal.”

“Under this bill, it may not be possible for the U.S. to even debate whether or not arms should be provided to units that have committed gross violations of human rights, and would seem to suggest that the U.S. cannot deny anything Israel might request, however inappropriate, from cluster bombs to ballistic missiles,” added former State Department official Josh Paul.

But some Democrats who oppose passage have instead argued that it would restrict the president’s ability to freely conduct foreign policy.

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IDF Tanks Open Fire On Own Gaza HQ, Killing 5 Troops In Disastrous Friendly Fire Incident

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have just suffered their biggest ‘friendly fire’ disaster to date during military operations in northern Gaza. In a Wednesday incident, a pair of Israeli tanks targeted a building which was serving as a forward operating HQ for their own troops.

Five Israeli soldiers were confirmed killed in the incident which happened in Jabalia. An additional seven troops were wounded, with three listed in serious condition. 

Soon after it happened social media images from Israel showed that there was a significant medical evacuation underway, with military helicopters seen transporting wounded to hospitals inside Israel. 

The tanks had reportedly been taking heavy fire just before the friendly fire incident, with the Jerusalem Post providing the following details:

Tank Unit 82’s soldiers said that they saw a potential threat, the barrel of a weapon, emerge from the three floor battalion headquarters, which was only 10-20 meters away from them. The soldiers hit by the tank were from Unit 202 is a Haredi-integrated unit. 

It was unclear why they did not recognize the battalion headquarters. However, the IDF said that the tanks had taken over the junction in Jabalya around 9:00 am and that the Battalion headquarters deputy commander had only arrived many hours later.

On Thursday the IDF listed the young troop deaths – which included an officer with the rest being among enlisted ranks – as follows: Capt. Roy Beit Ya’akov, 22, from Eli; Staff Sgt. Gilad Arye Boim, 22, from Karnei Shomron in Samaria; Sgt. Daniel Chemu, 20, from Tiberias; Sgt. Ilan Cohen, 20, from Carmiel; and Staff Sgt. Betzalel David Shashuah, 21, from Tel Aviv.

While it’s still under investigation, another local media outlet reported the following:

The tank forces had arrived at the area in the morning, and several hours later, the paratroopers reached the area and established a post in the building. Later in the evening, another group of paratroopers reached the area and notified two of the tanks there that they were entering the building.

Likely this will further energize angry anti-Netanyahu protesters who say he has not done enough to actually get the Israeli hostages back, but instead has prioritized the brutal fight to eliminate Hamas.

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